China Denies U.S. Carrier Hong Kong Visit Amid Maritime Tension

China has denied a U.S. carrier strike group’s request for a port visit to Hong Kong next week amid escalating tensions in the adjacent South China Sea.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs notified the U.S. Thursday of its decision to deny the USS John C. Stennis and its escort ships access to the former British colony, Darragh Paradiso, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong, said by phone. The ministry provided no explanation for the move, she said.

USS John C. Stennis on April 25

Photographer: Rosalind Mathieson/Bloomberg

The decision follows weeks of increasing diplomatic sparring between China and the U.S. over Beijing’s claims to more than 80 percent of the South China Sea. The nuclear-powered Stennis has played a central role in U.S. efforts to demonstrate its continued security presence in the disputed waters, with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter visiting the warship on patrolthere earlier this month.

The Stennis has become a "symbol of efforts to spark strategic tensions between China and the United States," said Shi Yinhong, director of the Center on American Studies at Renmin University in Beijing and a foreign policy adviser to the State Council. "The cancellation is a snapshot of the current intensity in China-U.S. security relations. Without significant security need, routine port calls would not have been canceled."

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t immediately respond to a faxed request for comment.

Port Visits

China’s claims to the South China Sea have fueled disputes with other Southeast Asian nations that assert rights to the area, including Vietnam and the Philippines. Tensions are running high as the region braces for a ruling by an international arbitration panel on a Philippine challenge to China’s claims.

While U.S. warships frequently visit Hong Kong, port calls have been canceled at times of diplomatic strain between the two Asia-Pacific powers. In 2007, China denied access to the city’s port by the aircraft carrier, the USS Kitty Hawk.

“We have a long track record of successful port visits to Hong Kong, including with the current visit of the USS Blue Ridge, and we expect that will continue," Paradiso said, referencing the U.S. Navy command ship already moored in the city.

Beijing has reclaimed more than 3,000 acres to build up artificial islands, some of them featuring ports and runways that will allow it to better assert its claims to a waterway that hosts more than $5 trillion in annual shipping. The U.S., which is not a claimant, contends that the militarization of the islands may hinder navigation in the waters.

De auteur maakt het onbelangrijk genoeg, maar in deze tussenzin verraadt hij zelf al: "Whilethe demand for oil does continue to rise in the developing world, even there it’s not climbingat rates previously taken for granted."

"In its early days, oil frequently yielded an EROEI in excess of 100:1, meaning that 1% or less of the energy contained in a barrel of oil had to be expended to deliver that barrel of oil. Not a bad bargain. Oil production today more typically has an EROEI around 20:1, while tar sands and oil shale tend to be about 5:1 and 3:1, respectively. By contrast, it is debatable whether corn ethanol exceeds break-even: it may optimistically be as high as 1.4:1. Switching from conventional oil to corn ethanol would be like switching from a diet of bacon, eggs, and butter to a desperate survival diet of shoe leather and tree bark. Other approaches to biofuels, like sugar cane ethanol, can have EROEI as high as 8:1.

To round out the introduction, coal typically has an EROEI around 50–85:1, and natural gas tends to come in around 20–40:1, though falling below the lower end of this range as the easy fields are depleted. Meanwhile, solar photovoltaics are estimated to require 3–4 years’ worth of energy output to fabricate, including the frames and associated electronics systems. Assuming a 30–40 year lifetime, this translates into an EROEI around 10:1. Wind is estimated to have EROEI around 20:1, and new nuclear installations are expected to come in at approximately 15:1. These are all positive net-energy approaches, which is the good news."

Lost in the discussions about Bernie Sanders’s “socialism” is an obvious and important fact: What he’s actually proposing is not only not radical – it’s mainstream. Sanders decided not to dodge the “socialist” label and instead own it by contextualizing it in the broader American tradition. He even gave a sweeping speech in which he grounded his philosophy in the tradition of FDR:

“Almost everything he [FDR] proposed was called ‘socialist.’ Social Security, which transformed life for the elderly in this country was ‘socialist.’ The concept of ‘minimum wage’ was seen as a radical intrusion into the marketplace and was described as ‘socialist.’ Unemployment insurance, abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as ‘socialist.’ Yet these programs have become the fabric of our nation and the foundation of the middle class.”

All Sanders has done is challenge the gospel of neoliberalism, which has systematically gutted our country’s public institutions. America’s economy has been steadily deregulated since the 1980s, when President Reagan first surrendered to the privatization scheme of neoliberalism. What we’re left with now, as Sanders pointed out in that speech, is a system “which during the 1990s allowed Wall Street to spend $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to get deregulated. Then, ten years later, after the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior of Wall Street led to their collapse, it is a system which provided trillions in government aid to bail them out.” In other words, we now have socialism for the rich and free market capitalism for everyone else. This is a perverse inversion of the historical norm, and Sanders is right to attack it.

On Tuesday night, Noam Chomsky was asked what he thought about Bernie Sanders’s platform. His answer was what you’d expect from someone aware of the nation’s political history:

“He’s considered radical and extremist, which is a pretty interesting characterization, because he’s basically a mainstream New Deal Democrat. His positions would not have surprised President Eisenhower, who said, in fact, that anyone who does not accept New Deal programs doesn’t belong in the American political system. That’s now considered very radical.”

This point can’t be made enough. For all his talk of a “revolution,” Sanders’s proposals are far too modest to be called revolutionary. He’s merely demanding a return to the midcentury norm, to the nation of FDR and Eisenhower and Johnson.

Another critical point is how aligned with public opinion Sanders’s policies are. If you cut through the rhetoric and the white noise, you find that most Americans support what are undeniably socialist programs, like Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. These programs aren’t understood popularly as “socialist,” but that’s what they are. Chomsky continues:

“The other interesting aspect of Sanders’s positions is that they’re quite strongly supported by the general public, and have been for a long time. That’s true on taxes. It’s true on healthcare…His proposal for a national healthcare system, meaning the kind of system that just about every other developed country has, at half the per capita cost of the United States and comparable or better outcomes, that’s considered very radical. But it’s been the position of the majority of the American population for a long time. So, you go back, say, to Reagan – right now, for example, latest polls, about 60 percent of the population favor it…You go back earlier to the Reagan years, about 70 percent of the population thought that national healthcare should be in the Constitution, because it’s such an obvious right.”

And yet we’re told, repeatedly, that Sanders is the outlier, the extremist. This is patently false, and the result of media-driven confusion about our history and the term “socialism.” The only radical movement in this country the last several decades has been led by the Republican Party, which has shifted our discourse so far to the right that what was once a bipartisan mainstream position is now radical by comparison.

Sean Illing is a USAF veteran who previously taught philosophy and politics at Loyola and LSU. He is currently a staff writer for Salon. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter. Read his blog here.

Now a number of politicians on both sides of the aisle want to defeat ISIS with yet more bombs, and President Obama is sending an additional 250 special operations forces to “advise and assist” in the fight there. Despite short-lived successes, this strategy has not worked for the past 14 years and couldn’t even shut down the Taliban. The war on terror has turned out to be a policy that breeds terror.

Just over a year ago, I became the first Western journalist to embed with ISIS in its occupied territories and to be granted interviews with many of its fighters and leaders over the course of 10 days in Raqqa, Syria, and Mosul, Iraq. As the result of those conversations, as well as dozens of others before the trip, and almost 50 years of experience in the region, I can tell you that the current Western strategy will not work.

The strategy is extremely short-sighted. Every day, the number of international terrorists rises as a result of Western bombing raids, and they have never been greater as evidenced by the events in Brussels, San Bernadino, and Paris. ISIS, which was first established in 2003 as a direct reaction to President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, is an ideology. You cannot destroy ideologies with bombs. Rather, you must discredit them, eliminate their recruiting grounds. Thus far, Western leaders have been unable to do this. It is therefore time for a fundamental change in strategy.

For a start, we must cut ISIS off from new supplies of weapons and ammunition. Shipments of arms to all rebel groups in Syria must cease. Many of them end up in the hands of ISIS, one way or another. Most ISIS fighters I saw in Mosul were equipped with U.S. Army gear—including machine guns, armor, and even boots. Though most of it was looted from Iraqi army bases, ISIS also buys a lot from the black market—effectively turning the American-backed Free Syrian Army into the group’s primary ammunition supplier.

courtesy Jürgen Todenhöfer

Then, we must prevent ISIS from getting more recruits. Dozens of them cross the Turkish border into ISIS territory every day. We must help Turkey close its border to ISIS. The current status quo is unacceptable.

Most importantly, we must deprive ISIS of recruits from the local population by supporting national reconciliation in Syria and in Iraq. This would deprive ISIS of the support of marginalized Sunni segments of the population. If Iraqi Sunnis alone turn their backs on the Islamic State, it will be done for.

Instead, U.S. bombs in Iraq kill Sunni civilians on an almost daily basis. Entire cities like Fallujah, Ramadi, and Baiji are leveled. In Ramadi, the murderous battle lasted three months. The result was the destruction of 90 percent of the city, hundreds of thousands of displaced people, and almost 2,000 dead civilians. Of the 2,000 ISIS fighters that defended the city, 1,850 were able to get away to foment terror elsewhere. Western politicians and the Western media are wrong to celebrate this catastrophe as a victory.

Using the Ramadi “victory” as a model, 10,000 ISIS fighters are now to be driven out of Mosul, a city with a civilian population of 1 million. Heated battles are already being waged between Iraqi government forces and ISIS at Qayyarah, 40 miles to its south, with enormous air and ground support from the U.S. here. On March 19, American planes attacked the University of Mosul, the second largest university in Iraq. Thirty Iraqi civilians who had nothing to do with ISIS died in the attack. As usual, the deaths of Iraqi civilians merited no mention in most Western media outlets.

Perhaps this strategy is one way to smash ISIS as a “state,” but it will only send the fighters underground. In fact, they would become the most horrendous underground movement of all time—not only in the Middle East, but also in the West.

This scorched-earth campaign is reminiscent of the Vietnam War. It runs counter to international law, and it is unwise. We must not remain silent on this issue, because Iraq has already suffered too much. And because there are smarter ways to put an end to ISIS.

Right now, the West has a great opportunity that has gone unrecognized by its leaders. The mood in Mosul and many other Sunni majority cities in Iraq has soured. At first, the Sunnis tolerated ISIS as a lesser evil in comparison with former Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki’s anti-Sunni government.

Now, though, the people of Mosul have had enough of their ISIS overseers.

The Sunnis hold their culture, which is more than 5,000 years old, in high esteem. They are increasingly disgusted by ISIS’s medieval regulations, its daily subterfuges and brutality, and its extreme forms of discrimination against women and girls. It is almost impossible for the inhabitants of Mosul to leave. They are prisoners in their own city, hostages of ISIS.

courtesy Jürgen Todenhöfer

If the United States and the international community were to force the current Iraqi government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and Maliki to grant the Sunnis a fair share in political life in Iraq, a popular uprising of Sunnis against ISIS could happen very quickly—not only in Mosul, but throughout Iraq. And that would be the end of ISIS both as a state and as a terrorist organization. An ISIS defeated by Arab Sunnis would have no future, not even in Syria.

If Sunnis are treated fairly and reintegrated into society, then and only then will the specter of ISIS be laid to rest.

President Obama: This is how you take out ISIS, not by obliterating cities.

Well-documented facts pertaining to the 9/11 wars, all supported by sustainable evidence, have barely made inroads into the collective consciousness of Western media consumers.

The War on Syria is no exception. Despite the presence of five years of sustainable evidence that contradicts the Western narratives, people still believe the “official” lies.

The consensus of ignorance is sustained by what Michel Chossudovsky describes as an “American Inquisition”. Beneath the protection of this psychological operation, the engineered enemy is Islam, and the Global War On Terrorism (GWOT) has become a brand to disguise imperial wars of aggression as “humanitarian”.

Thus, huge sums of public monies are diverted from worthwhile, domestic projects such as healthcare schools and roads, to support a criminal Project for a New American Century (PNAC) that is globalizing death, poverty, and destruction as the U.S led empire tries to impose a unilateral model of control over the world.

The U.S is said to be “exceptional”, and therefore the rightful ruler. Manifest Destiny writ large.

Dissent is suppressed within the framework of corporate media monopolies. Predominant narratives are supported by corrupt “NGOs” – totally bereft of objectivity — and intelligence agency “fronts”. Real investigative journalism offering historical context and legitimate evidence are relegated to the fringes, far outside the domain of the broad-based “consensus of misunderstanding.”

The “Progressive Left” has been co-opted. So-called “progressives” (presumably unwittingly) support Canada’s close relationships with Wahabbi Saudi Arabia, Apartheid Israel, and even the foreign mercenaries currently invading Syria (ie ISIS and al Nursra Front/al Qaeda).

The source upon which the pretexts for war are built and perpetrated are taboo topics, despite longstanding evidence that the official narratives explaining the crimes of 9/11 – and the subsequent “Gladio B” operations — are flawed. The truth is seen as “heresy”, and fact-based narratives are derided as “conspiracy theories”.

Thus, a firm foundation of lies that serves as a sanctified justification for global war and terror, remains strong.

But the stakes are high, as Western hegemony presses us closer and closer to a real prospect of widespread nuclear war. Already, the use of nuclear weapons is being “normalized” through the introduction of “mini-nukes” into the equation, and the blurring of lines between conventional and nuclear war.

The implications of this ‘integration’ are far-reaching because once the decision is taken by the Commander in Chief, namely the President of the United States, to launch a joint conventional-nuclear military operation, there is a risk that tactical nuclear weapons could be used without requesting subsequent presidential approval. In this regard, execution procedures under the jurisdiction of the theater commanders pertaining to nuclear weapons are described as ‘flexible and allow for changes in the situation …’ ”

The taboos need to be lifted, and the repeated lies contradicted.

Some of the more pernicious lies covering the escalating war on the democratic republic of Syria include unsubstantiated memes that fit neatly into the propagandists’ toolbox of false representations, and of projecting the West’s crimes onto the victims (Syria and Syrians).

The War on Syria is not a “civil” war; the “uprising” was not “democratic”; Assad does not “starve his own people”; Assad, does not “bomb his own people”; Assad is the democratically-elected president of Syria, and not a “brutal dictator”.

Conclusive evidence demonstrates, and has demonstrated for years, that the war is an invasion by Western proxies, which include ISIS and al Qaeda/al Nursra Front, and that there are no “moderates”.

The initial uprisings were marred by foreign-backed violence perpetrated against innocent people, soldiers, and police. Peaceful grassroots protests were hijacked by these murderous foreign-backed elements (as was the case in Ukraine) – all consistent with “hybrid war” as elaborated by Andrew Korybko.

The illegal sanctions imposed by the West – including Canada – coupled with terrorist practices of theft and hoarding of humanitarian aid – are responsible for the starvation.

Assad is a democratically elected reformer, and hugely popular with Syrians, not a brutal dictator. Claims that he “kills his own people” were further debunked when the so-called “Caesar photos”evidence was proven to be a fraud.

Many Syrians criticize Assad for not carpet bombing terrorist occupied areas (as US occupiers did in Fallujah, for example). Syrians sometimes refer to Assad as “Mr. Soft Heart”.

Unfortunately, though, the well-documented truth is not widely accepted. We need to shatter the “Inquisition” which serves to protect the criminal cabal perpetrating and orchestrating this global catastrophe. Truth and justice must prevail over lies and crimes. Currently, the opposite is the case.